Josh and I have been planning a Christmas trip this year for the kids instead of doing presents. It turns out that flights are pretty cheap right now and a few months ago we found some good flights to Puerto Rico that left Christmas morning and came home New Year’s Eve. We jumped at the chance for some good and inexpensive flights and bought them! So all these months later we’re so excited about taking the kids to one of our favorite places on earth! About three weeks ago the covid cases at both of our kids schools were high enough that the classes all went online for a couple weeks and all the kids were suddenly home full time doing school. Again. After about a day josh and I looked at each other with the same thought on our minds...If were all home doing school, work and social distancing then why not just leave for our trip early and social distance, work and school from Puerto Rico? Lots of things fell into place at just the right time for it to work out: flights were super cheap and the airlines had no problem switching our flights to the earlier date (including a big fat refund from them for the difference in ticket prices), one of the houses we had rented had availability early so we booked an extra week with them and extended our stay, the kids’ teachers were super accommodating and gave all the kids work for the extra couple weeks, we all got negative covid tests which were required for us to enter Puerto Rico and we even figured out that we could rent our house out while we were gone since it would be empty for three weeks! We went to work making all the plans to leave on the 12th of December instead of Christmas Day! It was a crazy rush of a couple weeks but we finally got it all figured out and done and our house ready for renters while we were gone (we ended up getting three different renters to cover 16 of the days that we would be gone and they all booked within the first two days of us having the ad up on Airbnb. It was so crazy and easy!)
The night before we left we finally told the kids that we had a surprise fir them and told them we were leaving on an airplane the next morning early. We didn’t tell them where we were going but gave clues that night and all the next morning for them to figure out the final destination. They all figured it out by the time we got to the airport and they were excited but also didn’t quite know what to expect. But we were off!
This was the boys first plane ride ever and they were mostly excited to just be able to ride on a plane. It worked out great that we were flying during covid cause they have the seats spaced out so much that no one is ever booked in a middle seat. So we ended up having two full rows for our family. And the kids loved having their own personal screen for games and movies. They were completely entertained the whole way. Josh and I were pooped so we got some good time to relax and sleep on the flight. We had a layover at JFK for a couple hours and by that time everyone was tired from being up early and flying all day. We played games while we waited but also slept wherever we could find a spot. Desh loves watching the other airplanes take off and kept saying he was watching them “blast off”. We were happy to get on our next flight and after a few hours we finally made it to San Juan! Our flight touched down at 11:30 pm and we gathered our luggage, rented a car, showed the guard our negative covid tests and that was that. We had made it all the way there and we’re so excited for it! We had a good surprise come from the car rental place when they realized that they no longer had any 8 passenger mini vans only 7 passenger ones. They upgraded us to a 15 passenger van for no charge! I was already trying to figure out how to make it through the 3 weeks crammed into a mini van with all our long legged kids, so that was icing on the cake to be able to have some extra room for the trip. We had a short 20 minute drive to the house we rented and we fell into bed around 1:00 am. Day 1 of our Christmas trip was over!
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